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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is one of the biggest games of the year therefore expect quite a lot of official products rolling out from Activision and Co. In this case we’ll be taking a look at the ‘crazy cats’ over at MadCatz who have sent us the Combat Controller for the Xbox360 (Also available on the PS3, a wireless version).

A controller which has been targeted towards the hardcore players of MW2 and promises to give you a immersive playing style with this specially created controller.

Does the controller keep up the combat or does it feel like a knife wound hindering your play?

The controller (Available in digital black, or digital white) comes in a rather tidy combat case, which in our test sadly turned out not to be bullet proof, a little gutting.

The first problem we encountered was that there isn’t any initial clue of how you place the controller into the box, there is a plastic slit in the box however no visual evidence of how it’s supposed to be placed if you wish to close the box. So best to keep the controller sitting up right like shown in the image.

Onto the controller itself.

Your first reaction is the size of the controller it is the same dimensions except for its width. The main enlargement on the controller is the bumpers. They are twice the size as the official xbox360 controller. Perfect for a player who’s index fingers are a little clumsy\massive, allowing for more space for your fingers to be laid out. The bumper’s feedback how you would expect and are a welcomed improvement to the official bumper sizes, especially for players who need the space.

The triggers on the controller are also of a bigger size mainly because they are fully working ‘Combat Triggers’. 

These triggers are of a larger size and jut out further that the official ones. They emulate an actual gun trigger style button and feel like the perfect shape for a First-Person shooter on the consoles. Sadly we felt that the button feedback we got out of them wasn’t what we were after. The triggers are rather soft and you don’t feel a strong feedback from them, you hardly know if your ‘squeezing off a few’ or emptying a full clip.

The main difference between an official controller and the combat controller is the addition of the “Twin Combat Buttons” placed on the back of the controller. These buttons can be custom-mapped to 3 different buttons.

This is a feature which you could get used to over time, however we felt that unless you had begun using the controller from the start of your experience with the game you may forget you have the 2 mapped buttons on the back. As well as this the buttons aren’t really located in the right places on the back. You’ll find that due to the width of the controller you will end up moving your fingers over to access the buttons, during the time you may of just had someone pump 3 barrels of lead into your chest, nasty.

As well as this you’ll also find that if your the owner of small fingers, they will get warn out pretty quickly. During our play test we found that we even had to change from our index finger to our middle finger to use the trigger, which really didn’t feel comfortable and we lost quite a bit of control of our characters movement.

Returning to the front of the controller where most of the action happens, you’ll notice that it’s lit up like a firework show.

Both thumb sticks are back-lit with a glowing green light, which makes for a colourful presence during those night-time gaming sessions. Unfortunately the buttons aren’t backlit, only the sticks are, we would of like to of had a fully of firework party underneath all of the face buttons as well.

The sticks are of a soft white rubber texture which doesn’t really keep your thumbs where you want them to be. The don’t have any grip on them. If you look at an official controller they have 4 placed lines on the thumb-sticks. These are there to keep your thumbs well placed on the sticks, annoyingly they are nowhere to be found on the Combat Controller which is even a little more odd seeing as the controller sports 2 rather nice grips to either side of the controller.

Lastly, let’s take a look at the controllers face-buttons and d-pad. None of the buttons are ‘bevelled’ like an official controller, but we believe this is something to do with the fact that you can only get buttons like that on Microsoft’s official product.

The d-pad is rather retro and isn’t like your standard ‘Turntable’ style d-pad, it’s actually much like a NES controller back in the day. However, that worked for the NES way back then and you won’t find it working well here. The buttons are rather harsh and clunky with very little feedback. We felt if you were equipped with a weapon that had a grenade launcher attached it was a nasty job switching to the weapon. As well as if you were to throw off a supply case grenade, It really didn’t feel natural.

The Combat Controller overall is an interesting topic, if your after a controller which is going to give you full control of the battlefield we recommend sticking with Microsoft’s own. However if your the owner of the hand-size of rather big human this controller is most probably perfect for you, especially if you’ve used controller’s like this one before.

November 30th, 2009 Posted by Thrungus | Hardware, Reviews, Xbox 360 Tagged under | Activision, Controllers, Infinity Award, Madcatz, Modern Wafare 2, review, Written Comment on This Post | Comments (1) Discuss this Post | On the XG:Forum

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